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How should the U.S. government deal with a foreign bank that conspired to cheat the Treasury out of billions in revenues by helping rich American hide money overseas? Here's one idea: slap the bank with a big financial penalty, the costs of which will mainly be picked up by shareholders who had nothing to do with the crime while letting the culpable individual bank officers off the hook. That is what the U.S.
If you think wage theft is being overblown by worker advocates, as some business groups suggest, check out this outrageous story.
Last week, Philadelphia restaurant franchise Chickie's & Pete's agreed to pay employees around $8.6 million in back wages to settle a Department of Labor (DOL) investigation and several lawsuits brought by employees past and present.
Simplifying the tax system is a cause that any conservative will happily get behind -- until, that is, it turns into a realistic legislative proposal. That's when many politicians on the right go scrambling for political cover, along with plenty of Democrats. Why? Because serious tax reform will remain a pipe dream without first reducing the influence of money in politics.
Reining in the mortgage interest tax deduction is a great case in point.
The American food industry has made a killing for years by pumping their products full of unhealthy but delicious ingredients. This was documented most recently by Michael Moss in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How Food Giants Hooked Us, which showed how food companies manipulated levels of highly addictive, but unhealthy ingredients, to draw consumers to their products.
The odds that Republican House Speaker John Boehner will allow a vote on raising the minimum wage remain as low as ever, but some large retailers are already raising the wage on their own initiative. On Wednesday, clothing chain Gap Inc. announced it would be raising its base wage from $9 to $10 per hour next year, directly benefiting as much as 72% of its hourly workforce.
If you believe David Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise has a fresh and sweeping vision for saving conservatism from the dustbin of history. That's odd, because when I read the supposedly groundbreaking article in Commentary magazine by AEI's Arthur Brooks about poverty and opportunity, his vision didn't seem so radically new to me.
Detroit's Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr, has filed a “plan of adjustment” with the court in the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. It includes some troubling news, some hopeful news and leaves out important items that should be known before a final plan for moving forward is settled.
Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase the price of a $16 product at Walmart, such as the typical DVD, by just a cent if all of the extra costs were passed on to consumers, according to an analysis by an economist for Bloomberg News. [...]